“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk tweeted.
Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent… https://t.co/Cx5mfKtKVi
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 1652435078000
Twitter shares plummeted 20% in pre-market trading following Musk’s tweet on Friday that the deal had been halted for details on a recent filing from Twitter.
The microblogging site said in its latest quarterly results “that the average of false or spam accounts during the first quarter of 2022 represented fewer than 5% of our monthly daily active users during the quarter.”
Illustration: Rahul Awasthi
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Musk’s effort to reform Twitter has included fighting fake accounts. He said in a statement announcing his deal to buy Twitter last month that he wanted to fight spam bots, authenticate all humans, and open source the company’s algorithms.
On April 25, the Tesla CEO and Twitter reached an agreement to buy Twitter.
Musk’s latest tweet came against the backdrop of Twitter freezing hiring as part of its pre-deal cost-cutting measures.
Kayvon Beykpour, head of consumer product, and Bruce Falck, in charge of revenue product, were both asked to leave the microblogging site by chief executive Parag Agrawal.
The truth is that this isn’t how and when I imagined leaving Twitter, and this wasn’t my decision. Parag asked me t… https://t.co/TCmDsyNo9R
— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) 1652372715000
Beykpour said in a tweet on Thursday that he had been ‘asked’ to leave by Agrawal, while he was on paternity leave. He said Agrawal wanted to ‘take the team in a new direction’.
Bloomberg contributed to this story.
